Blog:

Why MailChimp Turns to Evernote Business to Get Things Done

Posted by Kasey Fleisher Hickey on 03 Jun 2013

Posted by Kasey Fleisher Hickey on 03 Jun 2013

When we first launched Evernote Business, our hope was that it would help teams work smarter by alleviating the unnecessary stresses of sharing information within a company, reducing the amount of duplicate work produced, and allowing people to discover useful information quickly and easily.

Aaron Walter, head of UX at MailChimp , the company that lets millions of people build and connect with their communities via email, knew that his team could be working smarter. He turned his team, many of whom were already Evernote users, onto using Evernote Business as their ‘virtual town square.’ Since implementing Evernote Business, Aaron and his colleagues haven’t looked back.

Evernote Business has allowed MailChimp’s nimble team to gather and share knowledge quickly and effectively, collect research and data points in any format in one place, and encourage data-driven decision-making.

We recently had the opportunity to stop by MailChimp’s Atlanta offices to chat with Aaron and a number of other team members about how Evernote Business has transformed their workflow.

Data collection
A key functionality of Evernote Business (and Evernote, of course) is that it allows you to capture information in any format. This is particularly useful to the MailChimp team, as individuals are able to add documents, attachments, emails, web clips, audio and text notes to their Evernote Business notebooks.

To keep things streamlined, the MailChimp team manages a highly curated Business Library and makes sure to evaluate things before they go into Business Notebooks. This approach empowers more team members to share valuable information, making everyone else at the company smarter and more informed. The company even has an email alias that anyone in the company can send ideas/suggestions to. These emails are parsed out and selectively sent to an Insights Notebook. The system ensures that great ideas are never lost in an email inbox.

Data discovery
One of the most valuable aspects of Evernote Business is that it allows more team members to discover information, whether they were looking for it or not. For MailChimp, a lot of useful information was being shared among individual team members, or simply sat in a silo — in someone’s email or desktop. Getting information from someone often involved pestering them at their desk, and more, knowing exactly what you were looking for. With Evernote Business, MailChimp was able to break down the silos and bring together disparate information in one place, making it more discoverable for team members.

Evernote Business makes it easy to get information in any format into the system (team members simply email information into their Business Notebook). From there, any team member can quickly search for what they are looking for, visually glance over notes, and connect the dots between different pieces of information. By visualizing data in this way, individuals are able to see noteworthy trends among data that they would have otherwise missed. With the Activity Stream feature, it’s also easy to track what pieces of content have been added, updated, and shared, so useful information is often surfaced.

Data-Driven Decision Making

“Nobody has an excuse to make an uninformed decision anymore” -Federico Helgado, MailChimp

Aaron pointed out that his team became ‘more strategic overnight’ after they implemented Evernote Business, largely because they were able to make more data-driven decisions based on the amount of data they were able to collect, organize, and share through Evernote Business. The team set up automated reports to get emailed into a Campaign Insights Notebook, implemented a tagging system for customer interactions and persona type to help them better understand customer needs, and were able to quickly start using this information to inform their product roadmap. Rather than making these types of decisions based on gut, Aaron’s team now has data that supports whatever direction they choose to go.

Evernote Business has transformed the way Aaron’s team works, and we hope it can do the same for yours. Learn more about Evernote Business, and sign up today.